Tuesday, December 27, 2016

The problem with thinking in terms of best movies of the year is not only that it imposes an arbitrary dividing line, a line made more complicated by the uneven temporality of releases, but that it ties the calendar of films to other events on the calendar. Case in point Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, last spring or summer its punks versus neo-nazis would have seemed like an entertaining and necessary point of conflict. Once you decide that your protagonists are a punk band nazi skinheads follow as the necessary antagonist. It is part of the natural order, like cats and dogs or aliens and predators. Who else would punks fight, hippies?

Monday, December 05, 2016

“What Hegel calls consciousness, or, more to the point, consciousness of
the universal, Marx calls "ideology." It is the same thing, and yet
this change of denomination, like the deus sive natura of Spinoza (conscienta
sive ideologia, I propose), carries with it the possibility of saying something
new, or bringing it to the foreground. And at the center of debate is the part of
unconsciousness constantly rejected by Hegel at the limits of the
phenomological field”Etienne Balibar

I have early noted an increasing
turn to Hegel in Balibar’s writing both here in this blog and in an essay that
will be published here. The recently published Des Universels completes this turn, while also making it clear that
as much as Balibar often lists Hegel as a transindividual thinker, his interest
in Hegel has less to do that particular problem than with the problem of universals.
Spinoza might be the preferred thinker of the transindividuality for Balibar,
but Hegel is the thinker of the universal.